AN EXPLANATION SYSTEM FOR FRAME-BASED KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZED ALONG MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS

This paper describes an explanation system for frame-based knowledge about events, as presented in a visual expert system. As such, it can be applied to representations that embody different frame organizational relationships such as is a, part of, instance of, similarity, and time. This may be contrasted with most current expert systems which employ rule-based knowledge representations. In addition, such expert systems typically do not deal with complex spatio-temporal information and only a small number of them have any explanation capabilities. The system described in this document is capable of making inferences about frame comparisons and temporal relationships not present in the knowledge base, and provides output in both textual and pictorial formats. The graphical format is particularly useful for revealing the structure of the knowledge frames. TRUNCATED